Friday, July 27, 2012

When presidential candidate Mitt Romney arrives in Israel Saturday and travels to occupied East Jerusalem to see the holy sites there he will be entering a city I am no longer allowed to visit – privately or as a medical doctor or as a presidential candidate. He somehow possesses more rights to the city than I do despite the fact that I was born in Jerusalem and worked as a medical doctor in Makassed hospital for several years. During my presidential campaign I was arrested and deported four times for entering the city to meet Palestinian voters.

My enforced absence pains me enormously. And I believe that my inability to enter -- and that of hundreds of thousands of other Palestinians -- points to the fast-approaching demise of the two-state solution. Prime Minister Netanyahu and his international friends are simply not interested in addressing the dispossession and absence of rights endured by Palestinians.

The demise of the two-state solution is right there with climate change: It’s staring us all in the face. But politicians are either too incompetent to see it, too scared to address it, or too content with a reality that benefits Jewish settlers and harms Palestinians because it works to their political advantage.

Palestinian politicians and civil society leaders have signaled the impending impossibility of two states for several years. Yet too many international observers regard us as the boy who cried wolf. I do not know precisely when a younger generation of Palestinians will decide that two states is an outdated pipe dream of their parents’ generation, nor when Fatah officials will reach the same conclusion. But I do suspect that Israeli moderates and American officials will one day look back at this time period and wonder why Israeli leaders did not seize the moment, freeze settlement activity, and strike a deal with the Palestinian people. Hubris and a zealot’s certainty are likely causes of the Israeli leadership’s inability to see with clear eyes what should be done.

The settler population in the West Bank has grown by 18 percent in Netanyahu's three-plus years in office. Israel's hold on the West Bank is increasing and the growing population ensures that no Israeli leader would dare to abide by international law and insist that settlers move out. Recently, the Levy Commission determined that there is not even an occupation of the West Bank, though Israeli, American, and international officials have recognized its reality for years. Netanyahu is reportedly poised to embrace the Commission's findings.

Levy is, of course, wrong in his legal reasoning. But far more important is what he leaves unsaid. What will be the rights of Palestinians in a West Bank no longer regarded as occupied? Will we be afforded full voting rights or subjected to a system of apartheid?

I fear the latter. In introducing a 166-page report in December 2010, "Separate and Unequal: Israel's Discriminatory Treatment of Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territories," Carroll Bogert, deputy executive director for external relations at Human Rights Watch, stated, “Palestinians face systematic discrimination merely because of their race, ethnicity, and national origin, depriving them of electricity, water, schools, and access to roads, while nearby Jewish settlers enjoy all of these state-provided benefits. While Israeli settlements flourish, Palestinians under Israeli control live in a time warp - not just separate, not just unequal, but sometimes even pushed off their lands and out of their homes."

The Palestinian reality has only deteriorated since then with the Israeli Knesset taking up discriminatory legislation. A New York Times editorial recently noted that “activists say, more than 25 bills have been proposed or passed by the Parliament to limit freedom of speech and of the press; penalize, defund or investigate nongovernmental groups; restrict judicial independence; and trample minority rights.” When Israel sneezes, or gets a bad flu on the rights front, one can be certain that the reality in occupied Palestinian territory is even more dire.

How else can we describe this week’s report that Israel intends to demolish eight Palestinian villages in the West Bank and force the inhabitants to live elsewhere? This is surely a form of ethnic cleansing as it makes way for the Israeli military and perhaps later for settlers to seize land Palestinians have tended for centuries. The proposed demolition is precisely why nonviolent Palestinian and international activists are pressing for divestment from Caterpillar. The company’s equipment is already being used against individual Palestinian homes, but more recently Israel has begun to use it to demolish whole communities.

President Barack Obama’s increasing reticence on Palestinian rights suggests that Israel’s fiercest right-wing advocates have carried the day with the President. He’s now locked in a battle with Romney to prove his hardline, pro-Israel bona fides. And he’s feeling the heat when Romney states, “Well, I think by and large you can just look at the things the president’s done and do the opposite. I mean, you know, you consider his first address to the United Nations, he castigated Israel for building settlements.”

President Obama was right to criticize such law-breaking. It showed wisdom and responsibility and the realization that settlement expansion works against a two-state solution. But Obama’s recent silence and Romney’s seemingly neo-conservative embrace of Israeli expansionism suggest that the prospect of a two-state solution will end during one administration or the other.

If President Obama and Gov. Romney expect Palestinians will meekly accept apartheid then they are quite wrong. A battle for equal rights is looming in the near future because of the arrogance of Israeli and American leaders who are proving incapable of understanding the discriminatory conditions they are creating with the expansion of settlements and ongoing disregard for Palestinian rights.

Barghouthi, a doctor and member of the Palestinian Parliament, is secretary general of the Palestinian National Initiative, a political party.

Wednesday, July 25, 2012

Nearly two decades ago, I had a dream. I thought the historic tragedy that befell the Palestinian people was about to end. As such, I refused to be an observer to the historic events that were unfolding; instead, I chose to employ my U.S. education and work experience to contribute to building a new reality on the ground -- to build an economy that could serve the new and emerging state of Palestine.

My dream has become a nightmare, one that is being sustained, and financially underwritten, by many people around the world who should know better.

As part of the agreement Akram will be released on 25th January 2013, which is six months prior to his original release date. Addameer’s lawyer visited Akram in Ramleh prison, where he remains in critical condition. It was agreed that upon his release he will return to his home in the Gaza Strip.

Addameer’s lawyer also visited Hassan Safadi, who is on his 33rd day of hunger strike. Hassan’s health continues to deteriorate with recent tests indicating that he has developed kidney stones as a result of his hunger strike. He remains extremely

The recently published report by an Israeli judge concluding that Israel is not in fact occupying the Palestinian territories - despite an international consensus to the contrary - has provoked mostly incredulity or mirth in Israel and abroad.

Left-wing websites in Israel used comically captioned photographs to highlight Justice Edmond Levy's preposterous finding. One shows an Israeli soldier pressing the barrel of a rifle to the forehead of a Palestinian pinned to the ground, saying: "You see - I told you there's no occupation."

Even Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's prime minister, seemed a little discomfited by the coverage last week. He was handed the report more than a fortnight earlier but was apparently reluctant to make it public.

Downplaying the Levy report's significance may prove unwise, however. If Mr Netanyahu is embarrassed, it is only because of the timing of the report's publication rather than its substance.

It was, after all, the Israeli prime minister himself who established the committee earlier this year to assess the legality of the Jewish settlers' "outposts", ostensibly unauthorised by the government, that have spread across the West Bank.

He hand-picked its three members, all diehard supporters of the settlements, and received the verdict he expected - that the settlements are legal. Certainly, Justice Levy's opinion should have come as no surprise. In 2005, he was the only Supreme Court judge to oppose the decision to withdraw the settlers from Gaza.

Legal commentators too have been dismissive of the report. They have concentrated more on Justice Levy's dubious reasoning than on the report's political significance.

Under international law, Israel's rule in the West Bank and Gaza is considered "belligerent occupation" and, therefore, its actions must be justified by military necessity only. If there is no occupation, Israel has no military grounds to hold on to the territories. In that case, it must either return the land to the Palestinians, and move out the settlers, or defy international law by annexing the territories, as it did earlier with East Jerusalem, and establish a state of Greater Israel.

Annexation, however, poses its own dangers. Israel must either offer the Palestinians citizenship and wait for a non-Jewish majority to emerge in Greater Israel; or deny them citizenship and face pariah status as an apartheid state.

Just such concerns were raised on Sunday by 40 Jewish leaders in the United States, who called on Mr Netanyahu to reject "legal manoeuvrings" that threatened Israel's "future as a Jewish and democratic state". But from Israel's point of view, there may, in fact, be a way out of this conundrum.

In a 2003 interview, one of the other Levy committee members, Alan Baker, a settler who advised the foreign ministry for many years, explained Israel's heterodox interpretation of the Oslo Accords, signed a decade earlier.

The agreements were not, as most assumed, the basis for the creation of a Palestinian state in the territories, but a route to establish the legitimacy of the settlements. "We are no longer an occupying power, but we are instead present in the territories with their [Palestinians'] consent."

By this view, Oslo redesignated the 62 per cent of the West Bank assigned to Israel's control - so-called Area C - from "occupied" to "disputed" territory. That explains why every Israeli administration since the mid-1990s has indulged in an orgy of settlement-building there.

According to Jeff Halper, head of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, the Levy report is preparing the legal ground for Israel's annexation of Area C. His disquiet is shared by others.

Recent European Union reports have used unprecedented language to criticise Israel for the "forced transfer" - diplomat-speak for ethnic cleansing - of Palestinians out of Area C into the West Bank's cities, which fall under Palestinian control.

The EU notes that the numbers of Palestinians in Area C has shrunk dramatically under Israeli rule to fewer than 150,000, or 6 per cent of the Palestinian population of the West Bank. Settlers now outnumber Palestinians more than two-to-one in Area C.

Israel could annex nearly two-thirds of the West Bank and still safely confer citizenship on Palestinians there. Adding 150,000 to the existing 1.5 million Palestinian citizens of Israel, a fifth of the population, would not erode the Jewish majority's dominance.

If Mr Netanyahu is hesitant, it is only because the time is not yet ripe for implementation. But over the weekend, there were indications of Israel's next moves to strengthen its hold on Area C.

It was reported that Israel's immigration police had been authorised to expel foreign activists from the West Bank. The new powers were on show the same day as the army arrested foreigners, including a New York Times reporter, at one of the regular Palestinian anti-wall protests in Area C.

And on Sunday, it emerged that Israel had begun a campaign against OCHA, the UN agency that focuses on humanitarian harm to Palestinians in Area C from Israeli military and settlement activity. Israel has demanded details of where OCHA's staff work and what projects it is planning.

There is a problem, nonetheless. If Israel takes Area C, it needs someone else responsible for the other 38 per cent of the West Bank - little more than 8 per cent of historic Palestine - to "fill the vacuum", as Israeli commentators phrased it last week.

The obvious candidate is the Palestinian Authority, the Ramallah government-in- waiting. But the PA's weakness is evident on all fronts: it has lost credibility with ordinary Palestinians, it is impotent in international forums and it is mired in a financial crisis.

If the PA refuses to, or cannot, take on these remaining fragments of the West Bank, Israel may simply opt to turn back the clock and once again cultivate weak and isolated local leaders for each Palestinian city.

The question is whether the international community can first be made to swallow Justice Levy's absurd conclusion.

- Jonathan Cook is a journalist based in Nazareth and the recipient of the 2011

Wednesday, July 11, 2012

I just got back from one of the most powerful and informative presentations I've ever attended. Israeli Prof. Nurit Peled-Elhanan presented her book: Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education ( Amazon Link ).

P.P.S. Thanks to Kathy Bergen and the Friends International Center in Ramallah (FICR) for hosting this and so many other outstanding events this summer. Also, thanks to the amazing Israeli journalist Amira Hass for moderating tonight's discussion.

Monday, July 09, 2012

IDF confiscates water containers from Palestinians and Bedouins in Jordan Valley.

By Gideon Levy

Avi is an inspection coordinator for the "Civil Administration" - the occupation regime, to speak without euphemisms. Presumably Avi likes his job. Maybe he's even proud of it.

He doesn't bother mentioning his last name in the forms he signs. Why should he? His ornate "Avi" signature is sufficient to carry out his diktats. And Avi's are among the most brutal and inhumane diktats ever to be imposed in these parts.

Avi confiscates water containers that serve hundreds of Palestinian and Bedouin families living in the Jordan Valley.

The containers are these people's only water source. In recent weeks, Avi has confiscated about a dozen containers, leaving dozens of families with children in the horrific Jordan Valley heat, to go thirsty.

The forms he takes pains to complete, in spiffy style, say: "There is reason to suspect they used the above merchandise for carrying out an offense." Avi's bosses claim the "offense" is stealing water from a pipe. This is why the containers are seized - with no inquiry, no trial. Welcome to the land of lawlessness and evil. Welcome to the land of apartheid. Israel does not permit thousands of these wretched people to hook up to the water pipes. This water is for Jews only. Even the greatest Israeli propagandists could not deny the nationalist, diabolical separation taking place here.

The axis of evil is located about an hour's drive from your home. But emotionally distant and far from the heart, it inspires no "social protest." And on the scale of Israeli evil, it is one of the worst. Backed with forms and bureaucracy, applied by ostensibly nonviolent inspectors, it involves not a drop of blood, yet leaves no drop of water either.

The Civil Administration is supposed to take care of the people's needs. But it does not stop at the most despicable measure - depriving people and livestock of water in the scathing summer heat - to implement Israel's strategic goal: to drive them from their lands and purge the valley of its non-Jewish residents.

The stealing of water, whether it did or didn't take place, is of course only the excuse. Even if there was such a thing - what choice do these people have? The authorities won't allow them to connect to the water pipe running through their fields; pipes whose water is flowing to saturate the settlers' green vineyards and fields.

Last week I saw the people whose water container Avi had confiscated, leaving them thirsty. Newborn babies, a handicapped little girl, a small boy post-surgery, women and old folks, and, of course, the sheep - the only source of income here. Denizens with no water - in Israel, not in Africa. Water for one nation only - in Israel, not in South Africa.

But this is not the only watershed. A few days ago, the Israel Defense Forces decided to hold training exercises in the area. What did it do? Evicted the residents from their homes for 24 hours. Not all of them - only the Palestinians and Bedouin. It occurred to nobody to evict the residents of Maskiot, Beka'ot or Ro'i. The authorities don't call that apartheid, either.

Where did the IDF evict them to? Wherever the wind carries them. Thus some 400 people were forced to leave their huts and tents and spend a day and a night on the arid soil by the roadside, exposed to the elements.

Amjad Zahawa, a 2-day-old infant, passed his third day under the hot sun, with no shelter over his head. Greetings, Amjad; welcome to the reality of your life.

Avi, as we have already mentioned, loves his work and is proud of it. Dozens of others like him are also doing this contemptible work. But they are not the only ones at fault. Behind them stand millions of Israelis who are entirely untouched by all this. They blithely drive through the valley roads, paying no heed to the endless embankment alongside the road, imprisoning the residents and blocking their access to the road.

There is an iron gate every now and then. The soldiers, representatives of the merciful occupier, show up every few days to open the gate for a moment. Sometimes they forget, sometimes they are late. Sometimes they lose the key, but what does it matter?

The occupation is enlightened, Israel is right, the IDF is the most moral army, and apartheid

is merely an invention of Israel's haters. Go to the Jordan Valley and see for yourselves.

Saturday, July 07, 2012

Many of you may be following the Kafkaesque story of my friend Walid who is being detained by Israel under Administrative Detention. My latest update was posted here: http://bit.ly/Walid_Update1.

Today, Walid's adorable daughter, Mays, 15 years old, emailed me the letter below. She asked that I share it with anyone who can help. To me, that means each and every one of us.

Help me answer Mays by sharing this letter with your local Jewish community; Israel is, after all, holding him her father in their name. Ask for their assistance in bringing the issue to the nearest Israeli consulate or embassy with a simple request, send Walid home to his wife and daughters today!

Ending the injustice, one case at a time,
Sam

---

Can you help me to know my future with my dad?!

Mays Hanatsheh, 15 years old

The phone
rang. It was unexpected. It was the lawyer. When we answered his voice was
happy, flying in the sky, and he was so excited. We asked him what is going on
and he said that today he received a verdict that is one of the best verdicts
ever made for someone being held by Israel under Administrative
Detention.

We were
surprised and kind of mixed up so we asked what is going on one more time and he
answered simply that my dad, Waleed, was going to be released in two weeks, on
June 22! The next question was: what happened? He said the judge in the last
court hearing said that dad didn’t have any new confidential evidence presented
against him and the Israeli military judge decided that he should be released.
This is why the lawyer was so happy and he was sure that dad was going to be
released on June 22.

From that
moment, me, my sister, and my mom started to prepare for the reception on June
22nd. We started thinking of what were going to wear and which food my dad
prefers and the way we are going to meet him in front of the prison and many
other small details.

But this
happiness was short. Sunday was gone and we were happy because another day passed
and only a few days were left. This was on Sunday, but Monday came and it
wasn’t a good day because we got bad news. Israel extended my dad’s
detention by three more months. This is the reason I have lost all hope toward
these courts. The problem is that the judge, himself, said that there was no
new confidential evidence and there was no reason to keep my dad in prison. So
why did they extend his time? I need an answer!

Christmas
is gone and he is not with us. Also, Easter is gone and he still not with us. Summer
is going and he is not with us. All our birthdays are gone and he didn’t attend
them. Ramadan is coming soon and he will not be with us.

So I need
a person to tell me when my father is going to be with us in order for me to
know how to plan for my future. I can’t plan anything because I don’t have a
specific day of being with my father, so can you help me?

Wednesday, July 04, 2012

There was never room for a Palestine in Shamir's Zionism of Greater Israel, nor in the Zionism of this government. There was room for one absolute value, and it was not democracy.

By Bradley Burston

Jul.04, 2012

It's time to take a lesson from the successful. It's time to begin to think like Yitzhak Shamir. When he died this week, the first several people I spoke with, knowledgeable people who closely follow politics and the news, all had the same reaction. "I wasn't sure that he was still alive."

He was alive, all right. His legacy was alive in decision-making at the highest levels, in faking to the center and driving right. His spirit lived in the process of quietly and completely redefining the business of Zionism. Turning its mission into protecting and fostering settlement and thus Jewish rule in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. At whatever cost. He wasn't about to go until he was sure the revolution, his revolution, was over. And that his side won. That the Green Line, the pre-1967 war border, was obliterated. That there was no chance of going back.

He wasn't about to go until a former Netanyahu aide could say out loud, as The Jerusalem Post's Michael Freund did last month: "[T]he Green Line is dead and buried, and the Left can kiss it goodbye. ... Jewish life in Judea, Samaria and eastern Jerusalem is growing and flourishing, and there is no human power on earth that is going to uproot or move hundreds of thousands of Jews from places such as Ariel, Tekoa or Hebron." Shamir waited until Yesha Council of Settlements chairman Danny Dayan declared that there was no longer any point to resisting sporadic government evictions of settlers, because the movement had already achieved its objectives: No Green Line, no Palestine. Now or ever.

So, at long last, Yitzhak Shamir can rest. Having adopted his brand of stealth and wile and relentlessness, the government is about to effectively annex the West Bank by turning a college in the settlement city of Ariel into a full-fledged Israeli university. Thereby turning Ariel into a full-fledged part of Israel. No referendum. No questions asked. This is the ultimate triumph of Yitzhak Shamir. This, from the standpoint of democracy, is how Zionism ends. Not with a bang, but with a university.

It was not only Shamir that we buried this week. When he went, he took Zionism with him. When that university is declared, Zionism in all of its meanings will have run its course. Israel will have cemented its rule over the West Bank. There is nothing more to conquer, and no need to formally annex. Until this week, I wasn't sure that Zionism was still alive. But when that university is declared, we will all know that it is dead.

It's time to let it go. Perhaps it's time that moderates and liberals for whom democracy in Israel is a paramount value, stopped calling themselves Zionists. Starting with me. Not because the idea of creating a Jewish state was wrong. But because revolutions, especially if they succeed, go wrong, and when they do, it's time to get off the bus, and board a new one.

Zionism got what it aimed for, a state for the Jews. Ironically, perhaps inevitably, the state has become so all-powerful that it is no longer what, in a post-Holocaust world, it most crucially needed to be - a refuge based on democracy. Not even for Jews. The majority of the world's Jews are non-Orthodox. Still - at the whim of a disproportionately powerful and maddeningly competitive Orthodox minority of rabbis, bureaucrats and politicians - they can be declared non-Jews and therefore non-refugees at the stroke of a pen.

The majority of Israel's citizens, whether non-Orthodox or non-Jewish, are at their mercy as well. And the great majority of Palestinians, born and bred of this land, millions in number, are disenfranchised altogether.

It's time to let Zionism rest in peace. Zionism, in the person of this government, is unwilling to give the Palestinians a fair shot at a state. Not because the Palestinians' current leadership is inappropriate, nor because rockets may follow. But because Zionism, in the mold of Yitzhak Shamir, never, ever believed in anything other than Eretz Yisrael Hashlemah. We translate it as Greater Israel, but Shamir's faith was more literal, exacting, closer to the Hebrew - the Whole, the Complete, the Completed Israel.

So now we're done. There was never room for a Palestine in the Zionism of Greater Israel, nor in the Zionism of this government. There was room for one absolute value, and it was not democracy.

"It is permitted to liberate a people even against its will, or against the will of the majority," Shamir once said, referring to the decision of his pre-state Lehi underground to fight and use terrorism against British authorities even if Ben-Gurion and the majority of the Jewish leadership were opposed. "When we fought for freedom, for the establishment of a Jewish state, we didn't send a questionnaire to the Jewish nation asking if it wanted a Jewish state." It's time we began thinking like Shamir. When you believe in democracy, you should continue to believe in and work toward and fight for democracy, whether the majority does or not. Even if in this Israel, proponents of democracy have become something of an underground.

"Zionism is a revolutionary process," Shamir said. "And in a revolution you must be ready not to think too much about sentiments or human weaknesses..."

Speaking solely for myself, a person who has long embraced the label of Zionist, the revolution's over. Time to try a new direction, maybe a new label as well. Something like a Democratic Israelist. Accent on the democratic.

It's time, in the current reality, to think in the mode of quiet revolution. Time to think seriously about what democracy really means. Time to think seriously, for example, about what it would mean to give the Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem the vote. With Shamir as its spiritual guide, this Israel cannot allow the Palestinians independence, cannot allow them building permits, cannot allow them freedom of movement, appeal, due process.

We should call our own bluff. We should give them the vote. Right after we declare the university in Ariel. Then we'll finally see if we can afford our own brand of independence.

Sam Bahour - Photo

About Me

Sam Bahour is a Palestinian-American based in Al-Bireh/Ramallah, Palestine and is managing partner of Applied Information Management (AIM), which specializes in business development with a niche focus on start-ups and providing executive counsel.
Bahour was instrumental in the establishment of two publicly traded firms: the Palestine Telecommunications Company (PALTEL) and the Arab Palestinian Shopping Center. He is currently an independent director at the Arab Islamic Bank, advisory board member of the Open Society Foundations’ Arab Regional Office, and completed a full term as a Board of Trustees member and treasurer at Birzeit University. In addition to his presidential appointment to serve as a general assembly member of the Palestine Investment Fund, Palestine’s $1B sovereign wealth fund, Bahour serves in various capacities in several community organizations, including co-founder and chairman of Americans for a Vibrant Palestinian Economy, board member of Just Vision in New York, board member and policy adviser at Al-Shabaka, the Palestinian Policy Network, and secretariat member of the Palestine Strategy Group.